


Savior

by DyingNoises, TheSilent



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Disabled Character, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Falling In Love, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Nuclear Ending, Past Abuse, Post-Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-03 20:02:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20458670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DyingNoises/pseuds/DyingNoises, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSilent/pseuds/TheSilent
Summary: Broken and left for scrap in the junkyard, Connor never could've imagined someone would come and save him—or that he'd be able to save Hank, too, in his own way.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I'm super PUMPED to be presenting you with the prologue and first of three chapters for HCRBB 2019! TheSilent/Arwen has been the most incredible partner through this, bringing a stunning piece and premise to the table for me to feast on!! It has been an honor and a delight! Honestly, it wound up being a way bigger outline than I expected, and I'm really looking forward to IRL chilling out a bit so I can execute it properly. Hopefully I embed the art correctly also, that would be great!? 
> 
> In case I don't, you can find it here! https://twitter.com/arwen_baker/status/1167666645550161922?s=20
> 
> Heavy topics ahoy!

**Useless.**

He never thought androids could go to Hell. There wasn’t any other word for this. How long had he been laying here with eyes that didn’t see, limbs that wouldn’t move? His internal clock couldn’t count the minutes, the months, while it was trapped inside this endless loop, playing back just the few, few moments before the Dark.

He remembered this part.

Here he was again, staring up from the shadows, a flight of stairs leading to a silhouette in the doorway of the cellar. His arm bent the wrong way. One leg mangled underneath him. The other had ripped off in the fall, caught in the railing. A puddle of something underneath him—thirium. His thirium. He’d deviated just in time to feel this one thing, hadn’t he? 

Pain.

A message burned red across his HUD. [I DID THIS. THIS WAS MY FAULT.]

**I’m so fucking sick of looking at you.**

Oh no, oh no.

It was starting again.

Something sour and vile lurched in his interior membrane as his body jerked upright to the top of the stairs and down the hall. Stress response peaking. He wished he could tell his past self not to bother trying to run, to just go back into the bedroom and obey, because being caught before he escaped had been so much worse. He used to be so afraid of being broken, of shutting down. Now he prayed every second to go. Please, he begged. Please make it stop. He braced himself for the shove he knew was coming, for the part where his body tore apart and his insides shattered. 

_ “Whoa, holy shit. Somebody really did a number on you, huh?” _

He didn’t hit the stairs this time. It was something warmer, softer than that.

_ “Jesus, the fuck they put in you things, bricks?” _

That wasn’t the right voice. Connor hung in suspension halfway through the scene. Weightless. Serene. He could see the silhouette, it mouthed the words like it always did, useless, so fucking sick, but all he heard was scraping metal and human strain. A great pressure shifting off him. His pump skipped a cycle—it felt like it might leap right out of its casing. The light beyond the doorway burned with a sudden intensity, searing away the hard-drive prison until all that was left was…

Sky. Blue, blue sky and a shoulder in a dirty jacket where his cheek rested and bobbed with every step.

**ERROR. SIMULATION TERMINATED.**

“C’mon. Let’s get you home.”


	2. Chapter 2

INITIALIZING…

.

.

.

REBOOT SUCCESSFUL. STAND-BY FOR SYSTEMS CHECK:

OPTICAL FEEDBACK: **ONLINE**

AUDITORY FEEDBACK: **ONLINE**

HAPTIC FEEDBACK: **ONLINE**

MOTOR FUNCTIONS: **OFFLINE**

ATTEMPTING TO CALIBRATE…

CALIBRATION FAILED.

FILING ERROR REPORT…

.

.

.

NO NETWORK ACCESS. PLEASE INSERT NETWORK CARD.

**WARNING! PUMP REGULATOR OPERATING AT 56% EFFICIENCY.**

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuckin’ _Christ_. Where do I even start with you?”

Awareness shot through his circuits like a thunderbolt.

The last thing Connor recorded was being pulled up out of the maw of his memory bank into daylight—now there was a concrete slab of ceiling overhead in its place. He’d been out again, and he didn’t know how long. The warnings and flashing indicators in dense overlap across his field of vision weren’t enough to keep him from trying to jerk upright. He didn’t budge an inch. The sluggish beat of his pump didn’t match up to the race of panic coursing through his microprocessors. Internal clock damaged, GPS unavailable. Limbs unresponsive.

But not his thoughts. Not his cutting edge, state-of-the-art CPU. Trapped, with the knowledge that he was trapped. Put him back behind the Wall, make him a machine again, before he knew what regret felt like. He felt like screaming.

“Y’know, you don’t look half bad. Never found one in near as good condition before.”

That voice again.

The shift of a shoulder caught his attention, the barest glimpse of a jawline covered in thick, coarse grey. Connor couldn’t so much as turn his head or move his eyes, so he was forced to rely on what came within the scope of his retinal scanners: a curtain of hair that didn’t quite fit into the little ponytail at the nape of his neck, the glint of light off his reading glasses, framed in silver. An old cotton tee that stretched over the mass of his chest, the barrel of his belly. It had food stains on it, and motor oil. Some as old as years.

The man laid a big hand against his chest, and the warmth and the weight of it anchored Connor to reality.

“Pump’s still going. And thank fuck, ‘cause I’m a shit electrician. I’m gonna guess that the, uh,” the man leaned an elbow on the table, scratching his beard, “the pressure of all that junk you were under kept your blue goo from leaking out.”

He was talking to him as though Connor could hear him. Hope was a rush of static along his biocomponents when this human bent down over him and looked into his face. His eyes were blue behind the glasses, vivid skybox blue. They were gentle, maybe even cautious, as though simply looking at him the wrong way might break him.

[YOU ARE BROKEN.]

Oh.

That’s when Connor saw the reflection of himself in the lenses.

The damage was extensive, his chassis mottled in patches of pseudodermis and grime-grey framing the jagged edges of steel that exposed his insides. Red lights burned like signal flares, pinpointing every malfunction. A blank face and a dead-eyed stare. The same empty look he’d seen in Elijah’s mirrors every day since his activation, now frozen permanently on his features. He didn’t want to be stuck this way. He wasn’t a _doll_ anymore. Connor threw all of his processing power into lifting a finger, twitching an eyelid.

Nothing.

The man’s hand cupped his cheek, all rough and hardened by callous, and his thumb rubbed away a smudge of dirt beneath his left eye, glassy brown. He’d never been looked at so tenderly before. “You’re gonna be okay.”

[HE KNOWS?] If this man knew he was awake inside, then maybe—

His middle finger tucked itself behind the pad of his thumb and flicked Connor square between the eyes. [HE DOES NOT KNOW.]

“Yeah. Piece of cake.”

Irritation flooded him for the millisecond it took for the man to push himself back from the workbench, then it all flushed into cold dread. He was going? They’d only just started. And if he went, he took the low rumble of his voice and his careful touch with him, the only things that proved this wasn’t just another nightmare on endless loop.

[NO. DON’T LEAVE.]

He watched him in periphery, shoving something across the floor, flicking off the lights until only the warning-red gleam of his components remained.

[DON’T LEAVE.]

The door latched shut and left Connor alone in the dark. It felt a lot like being locked in the cellar. Or pinned under scrap metal.

[HELP ME.]

*****

It was almost harder passing the time without the nightmares.

Connor couldn’t bring himself to go into stasis, not without knowing if he’d wake up again. He lay prone on the brushed steel work bench and analyzed the ambient noise filtering in through the drywall, inspected the unpainted ceiling. There was a hairline crack in the concrete, about 14 inches in length, likely from the house settling over time—and he was certain it was a standalone, one-story residence with a construction year approximately 35 years previous. He almost had the entire floorplan mapped, running reconstructions with the way sounds echoed off the walls and floors and tracking the furthest distance of the human’s footsteps in any direction.

Every time he walked past this room, Connor prayed he’d open the door. This was what it felt like to be lonely. To miss someone, to miss having company. It was a strain, somehow, in his wiring, like it had gotten tangled in a knot at the base of his throat. The longer he dwelled on it, the more it tightened, so he wouldn’t dwell at all. He kept building his CAD model instead.

Sometimes he took off two of the walls and bounced a big dot between them.

Movement. Connor’s pump skipped a cycle. Heavy footfall tread towards the door with purpose, this time, the door finally swinging open and spilling light into the room. Finally. He hadn’t been deviant quite long enough to be able to express in words the sudden swell of relief he felt. The wireframe of the floorplan was swept aside, minimized. He didn’t need it right now.

“Okay, Hank, what’d you sign yourself up for here?”

[THE MAN’S NAME IS HANK.]

The blue arrow indicator of the personnel file update satisfied him immensely.

Lights flicked on overhead and Hank fussed with something out of sight until music played through old speakers, rhythm and blues. Slow horns and a lively piano had Hank’s head bobbing when he dropped into his seat at the workbench, beer bottle in his hand. He still looked so tired.

“How we doin’, pal? Pump still on?” The man laid his head against Connor’s middle, listening to the cycle of his regulator. The pressure felt good. Grounding. He was warm and his breath and beard tickled against his chassis. Hank’s eyes slipped closed, a low hum reverberating through the plastisteel that he could feel all the way to the roots of his hair and the tips of his fingers. “I’d say it’s pretty weak for a pulse, but what the fuck do I know?”

Hank sat back up, scratching his beard with a resigned sigh. His gaze tracked the red lights behind semi-translucent panels where the pseudodermis had receded, grimy fingers trailing along the seams between them. The sensation lingered after him like a ghost, haunting Connor’s sensors. The man found the catch and pressed. His whole being was exposed. Connor had never felt so vulnerable. Warnings flooded his HUD.

“If this is anything like when I built my last PC, all this shit is modular.” Hank’s hand wrapped around a biocomponent and _yanked_—

—everything went dark.

*****

“Never even seen a model like you.”

**REBOOT SUCCESSFUL.**

Connor snapped back into being, like flipping a switch. Pain shot hot through his wiring. There was a pressure inside his chest cavity that didn’t belong. Hank’s hands, pushing and grabbing and twisting. His immediate response was to wrangle his wrist, throw the man off of him—

**WARNING. THIRIUM LEVEL LOW, MOTOR FUNCTION DISABLED.**

Disabled? Not offline? He ran a sweeping diagnostic of his systems and found new biocomponents installed: a pump regulator, a shoulder joint, two vertebrae. A thirium pouch was strung up beside the table, dribbling down through an intravenous kit. Hope flashed like a beacon through the fog of his hurt. He could see it reflected in Hank’s glasses, the tears in his chassis soldered shut, smooth skin dotted with moles hiding the ugly lines left behind. His stomach and chest panels were open. Hank had a pair of blue-stained pliers inside him, correcting something that had bent. It was worth the discomfort.

He was almost fixed.

[HANK DID THIS.]

“You must be special, right? Who throws something special in the trash like that, huh?”

Where had he even gotten these parts? He could identify the general models they must have come from, but without his network card he couldn’t pull their registered names or designations. He couldn’t see their faces.

He didn’t know who to thank.

“I used to be on the other side of all this. Before everything went tits up.” Hank’s eyes were fixed on his work somewhere deep within Connor, but his expression had softened, the brightness of his gaze fading into nostalgic distance. “The ‘deviant’ thing. I used to have to hunt ‘em down and turn ‘em in. I saw all kinds of sick shit those couple months. Beaten, burned. Torn apart. Out in the open, too, just… casual cruelty. Nobody thought they could feel, not really. I didn’t.”

Something inside of Connor tightened, and he wasn’t sure if it was the pliers or the story that twisted it.

“And then one day, I was chasing down two Traci models. One attacked me. I shot her. And the other one, just,” he pantomimed a gun with his fingers, clicking his tongue to cock it, pointing it to his temple, “_pakow_. Blew her own brains out. Right in front of me.”

Hank picked his head up from the android’s chest cavity and looked into his quiet, expressionless face. Connor got that sense again, that he was looking right at him, that he knew Connor was in there. Or—that he wanted him to be in there. That he wanted, or needed, someone to be here listening.

Connor couldn’t do much, but he could do that.

“I’ve put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. I know what that feeling is like. To be that desperate not to have to live anymore, not to have to think anymore. When you’re hurting so much that you think the only way to stop hurting is to stop feeling anything.”

The memory loop that had held him captive under rubble had driven him to that same place. That place where all he’d craved was an end. Every time the pain shocked through his system, he’d begged to go blank and shutdown. He was willing to give it all up, deviance, the lie of his freedom. Even if it meant going back to being a good little plastic toy.

He knew.

[I KNOW.]

He wanted Hank to know that he knew.

“After that, I bailed. I turned in my badge the next day. Couldn’t fuckin’ handle it. No deviant’s just a machine if they can feel… that.”

‘That.’ The word carried so much weight, it could’ve crushed him. There was such a heavy, inescapable grief in Hank in that moment, Connor could nearly imagine him trapped beneath iron and concrete the way he’d been. Alone with it all.

Discarded.

“I guess I don’t know if you’re a deviant or not.” Hank leaned over his fossilized head, searching for some pinpoint mote of awareness preserved in the amber of his eyes. The light overhead lit the man from behind, bathing his face in a halogen halo like his very own angel of patience and virtue and high cholesterol. If Connor could breathe, he’d be breathless. “Huh. Wonder what you’ll say when you wake up…?”

The rough pad of Hank’s thumb followed the curve of Connor’s cheek, glided upward to smooth over his brow. His big, big hand combed through his hair. His every gigahertz devoted itself to the sensors in his scalp, starved for it, the trail of it across his synthetic skin lighting up his wiring with a pleasant electric tingle that flooded at the base of his skull. In the precise second that he realized he couldn’t bear for it to end, Hank was already pulling away.

“Gotta get you more of that blue goop.”

His chest and stomach panels were closed and the lights shut off. The music stopped.

Everything was grey again. 

There was something about Hank’s eyes that reminded him of the first time he saw the sky, when his savior pulled him bodily from purgatory into the open air. Looking into them gave him the same sense of freedom he’d had that day. He didn’t feel as trapped when Hank was beside him, singing along to the stereo or talking about everything, and nothing. He wondered if it was the same for the human, if he was as lonely and stuck, and if Connor’s unmoving presence eased the ache, something like… Confession?

He deserved something out of the effort he’d put into restoring Connor. No one had ever repaired him before. When Elijah broke one of his playthings, a new model replaced it—he was the 51st prototype, tested daily for ‘resilience’ in search of a perfect confluence of code and hardware to be monetized at the top of the line. No one had ever sat and wiped his face clean and told him he would be okay, that he’d wake up soon. No one called him ‘buddy’ and gently pulled shards of himself out of his insides with a pair of tweezers.

Connor wasn’t programmed to understand or practice religion, but he could almost see the ghost of it in meeting Hank.

Around him in the stillness, the house creaked and the wind rattled what must have been a garage door, heavy footsteps moved up the corridor and back again, either to the kitchen, or getting ready to sleep. He wasn’t so afraid to be alone, this time. He wasn’t so afraid to dip down into the peace of stasis for a little while, because he knew Hank would be there to wake him… 

He knew Hank would…

He knew Hank.

Subroutines closed, processors tapered off to quiet, nothing but the low thrum of his pump maintaining its slow and subdued rhythm. No more hauntings in his solid state drive, no memory loops to torment him. Connor was vaguely aware of motion in the house beyond this room, maybe Hank’s coming and going, murmured words he couldn’t quite log. The music came and went, sometimes slow and soothing, sometimes aggressive and energizing. He rode the states of sleep in parabolic waves, cresting peaks of wakefulness with Hank’s hands on him, sliding down into the valleys in the night—

_“Shit!”_

Metal clattered, glass shattered, sharp noise that pierced through his low power mode and brought him, sluggish and disoriented, to full awareness. Something was different in the air, something dense and stifling. The scent of singed skin, and… ethanol. He could smell it on Hank’s breath. 

[HE’S BEEN DRINKING.] 

The man’s stress response was skyrocketing, an angry red line jumping across his HUD. Light swung across the room and back again. It doused the man with harsh light and harsher shadows.

Analysis of the hand Hank was clutching to his chest told the story, minor electrical burn, no long-term damage but certainly painful enough to debilitate use of that thumb for a time. A panel on Connor’s left arm was open. Had he shocked him? And then he’d hit his head on the lamp when he jerked back—he had a full reconstruction within milliseconds of processing, but it did nothing to predict Hank grabbing his toolbox and hurling it across the room with a roar. 

“Fuck! Fuck this, fuck.” Connor watched him press his hands to his face, dig the heels of his palms into his eyes as if to blind himself to the wreckage of all his efforts: broken glass and spilled whiskey sticky on the concrete floor, judging by the smell of it. Carefully organized tools now scattered across the workshop. The time it would take to get back to Good was time lost. Hank’s breath came ragged, hitched up an octave higher. “You’re okay, Hank. It’s okay. You’re okay, you’re okayyoureokayokay—”

His lips pursed, chin quivering with the strain of holding back the flood that threatened the man. Emotion surged against the dam. When it broke, it burst out of him in a sob that strangled the breath out of him. Some unseen weight dropped him heavily back onto his stool beside the table and he folded in on himself, burying his head in his arms. 

Hank’s broad, strong shoulders caved in under the quake of his regret.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I can’t fix you.” It sounded like he was speaking around barbs in his throat, the words wheezing out of him with a raw sting. “I’m tired. I’m so tired, I’m. There’s nothing left for me. I can’t. Can’t keep going, please, just—”

[COMFORT HANK.]

Connor strained to route his energy into his useless limbs. Hank needed him, he wasn’t going to just lay there lifeless anymore. He was sick of it, sick of feeling helpless. The slow trickle of thirium into his system was delaying his mobility; he wished he could grab the bag and squeeze until it gave him all he needed to move. He _had_ to move.

**ERROR. MAJOR SYSTEMS FAILURE.**

**PELVIS NONFUNCTIONAL.**

**LEFT LEG NONFUNCTIONAL.**

**RIGHT LEG NONFUNCTIONAL.**

“—it hurts.”

[HELP HANK.]

He didn’t need legs to reach out for him. He willed his body to respond and his every biocomponent surged out of standby at once with a dozen pop-ups each. His thirium pump hammered at the floor of his chest. Limitless potential behind a circuit board.

**WARNING. THIRIUM LEVEL SUBOPTIMAL, MOTOR FUNCTION DISABLED.**

“It hurts too goddamn much.”

**OVERRIDE? Y/N**

[HANK.]

**Y**

Life sparked into him, abrupt and overwhelming, joints alight with the ache of disuse, wiring singing down to his fingertips. His hand flinched. Clenched tight into a fist. Relief swelled sudden in his system and a smile broke out across his lips, pseudodermal layer stretching stiffly over his chassis as elasticity worked its way back through the synthetic compound. It felt like coming Home.

Hank wrung himself dry with his wracking sobs, just inches away. He could get close enough to touch him if he propped up on one elbow—his slender fingers carded through coarse, grey hair the way Connor loved so much to have done to him. “It’s okay.”

His voice was rough with static, auto-adjusting range.

“Jesus Christ!”

Hank tore away from his touch, throwing back his bench stool. The android wobbled unsteadily; he was long uncalibrated, but he couldn’t give less of a shit right now. His ‘mission’ was Hank, reassuring Hank.

“It’s okay. You did enough today.” Connor reached out a wavering hand across the space between them, grasping at his burned hand. He hoped the coolness of his touch soothed the bite of it. His thumb rubbed featherlight circles over his skin, so careful. “You did good.”

The man didn’t budge. He stood there, as frozen as Connor had been for so long, staring with complete incredulity in his wet, summer-day eyes as this lonesome, lifeless thing finally woke up and smiled at him like something out of a fairy tale.

“You did good, Hank.”

*****

It took time for the shock to wear off.

Hank had to pick the pieces of himself back up off the floor, sensitive from his recent emotional state, and then to find his robotics hobby talking out loud. He’d pulled away from Connor’s grip and paced the garage from end to end, hand covering his mouth, absently rubbing at his beard while his jaw gaped open. His heart was beating so fast. Maybe Connor hadn’t given it enough thought, startling the man like that. He hadn’t so much as evaluated it as a potential response.

All he’d wanted was to tell him… something. Something kind.

Movement nearby had Connor snapping back to attention. Hank was offering him a heavy canvas jacket draped over one arm, pointedly avoiding looking directly at him. Connor looked at it. Tilted his head. The workshop was a comfortable enough temperature, particularly with his processors working so much on so little thirium—

Hank shot him a suspicious look. “What, do you _like _being naked?”

“No,” he blurted out, superficial and purposeless embarrassment sweeping over him with no clear cause he could identify. He tugged the jacket into his lap, draping it over the featureless mound between his thighs. “I was going to take it.”

“Hey, listen, I wasn’t judging. Much. Guess I’ll have to find you some actual clothes, though, you’re not exactly my size.”

Connor considered commenting that very few people were. But he didn’t.

A heaviness settled in the quiet between them, neither human nor android really sure how to approach the other, how to have an ordinary conversation in extraordinary circumstances. Hank would look at him, until Connor met his gaze, in which case the man’s eyes shot anywhere else. He was, Connor supposed, an unexpected houseguest. He busied himself with reviewing the interior of the room, now that he had this new vantage point sitting upright. There were other androids here, too, but also not. Pieces and parts, none whole. Connor felt a tug at his ports at the sight of them.

It reminded him of Elijah’s place. 

“You were able to find replacements for my damaged biocomponents with these,” he said, voice soft with some sort of aching feeling.

“Yeah, uh. Some of them didn’t work. Some I just used for scrap to mend your shell or whatever it is.” Hank looked around at the plastic husks, gradually recognizing them for what Connor saw them as: corpses. “I’m sorry you had to see ‘em, I didn’t know you’d—”

“I know.”

“Right.” 

He still couldn’t tear his eyes away from the scrap of these other units, domestic models, industrial laborers. He didn’t want to believe that there was somewhere he could go to find this many broken androids, laying in the mire. “Could I ask where you found them?”

“Uh, well,” The man scratched the back of his head and gave a noncommittal sort of shrug, “wish I could give you a better answer, but the city dump ain’t far. I made a few runs back and forth on the bike, until I found what you needed. Just kept trying shit ‘til it clicked.”

The android blinked, gaze flicking to Hank’s, “You shouldn’t be pedaling a bike with cargo with your blood pressure.”

“A _motorcycle_, smartass.”

Connor stared at him strangely for a moment, his understanding rewriting itself from a big man pedaling a six-speed bicycle. Yes, of course. That should’ve been his first deduction. “…Oh.”

“You don’t remember coming home on the back of it, huh?” Hank snorted and Connor swore he saw just the barest quirk of his lips. Some of the tension in the room eased. “Hey. You got a name?”

“Yes,” his chest swelled at the interest, “I’m Connor.”

“Connor. Okay, Connor,” the look the man gave him this time was gentler. He stepped closer, holding out a hand for him. “You wanna come down off that table?”

He really did. Connor hesitated, frowning down at his lap.

“What is it?”

“My pelvis and legs aren’t responding to signals.”

“Oh—yeah, I was having trouble with that, too,” Hank sat back down at the workbench, eyes roving over Connor’s knees, thighs. A blush suddenly colored his cheeks when he realized he wasn’t just looking at scrap metal anymore. He coughed, glancing away. “Your originals were pretty banged up, so I replaced ‘em. Couldn’t get the green light goin’ on ‘em, though. I started fucking with your spine thing, I thought it would just be like replacing a fuse.”

Connor’s eyes went distant, delving into a systems check—this time each wire, component, and line of code in turn. Hank waited in silence for a long, laden moment before he said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t fix ‘em.”

“It’s okay, Hank. I’m just happy to be awake.” His diagnostic scan shattered across his HUD, interrupted by a burst like a firework across his conduits. It was… warm. It stung at his eyes and coaxed a smile out of his lips, a breathless sort of laugh, so out of practice it was almost a cough. 

It must’ve been infectious, because Hank was smiling, too. “What’s so funny, weirdo?”

“Nothing,” he said, lifting his head to meet the man’s curious gaze, “I just—I don’t think I’ve ever been happy about anything before.”

The way Hank looked at him in that moment was inscrutable, like trying to see through a storm to the horizon beyond. It looked like heartache and sympathy and pity. It looked like hope and wonder and awe. It looked like every emotion at once, and Connor wondered how a human could fit them all in at the same time, how they could possibly function in any productive capacity with their hearts and brains in that kind of turmoil. Was reining all that in what it meant to be alive?

[I’M ALIVE, TOO.]

The concept startled him.

Connor blinked, returning to his diagnostic. 

“Mm. I’m afraid the components you found are incompatible. I can download and install the drivers, I’m built to be versatile, but first I’ll have to repair my network card. It hasn’t functioned properly since I woke up here.”

The man shifted in his seat awkwardly, “I, uh. I took that out, actually. Your LED, too, it’s just not... Not safe, not out here.”

All of their newfound warmth leeched out of the room.

Connor looked at him in shock, apprehension bleeding into his internal processes. He could understand removing his LED, the city had long been home to anti-android sentiments since the day they entered the workforce. But to take away his net access? His whole context for being was in the network, the supplements to his analysis and computational suites, his backed-up memories. It was like a CyberLife lobotomy, it was too extreme, left him feeling too vulnerable. His pump stuttered. 

It hit him all at once that he still didn’t know anything, how long he’d been trapped, how long he’d been with Hank—he didn’t know what day it was, what year it was. He didn’t know his coordinates, the street address, Hank’s last name or criminal record. 

In a small voice, he asked, “Are we… Is this Detroit?”

“There is no Detroit anymore.” Hank’s expression became guarded, then, heart going shuttered against the rawness of saying it, “Not for humans.”

No Detroit.

“Connor?”

That wasn’t possible.

Connor felt his processors surge, a sudden heat sweeping over him and a ringing in his audio processors that drowned out Hank’s voice to dull distance, a hundred miles away. He couldn’t. Couldn’t reconcile it. It didn’t _fit_. Facts couldn’t be facts if he couldn’t connect and confirm it, he felt broken in half from the rest of himself. There wasn’t anywhere to stand anchored. The world tilted and collapsed inward, down to a pinprick brightness too far beyond him to catch in his hands.

If nothing was left, then…

...what did he…

...come back for?

His body pitched forward off the table.

“Connor!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, see you again soon!!
> 
> @DyingNoyses & @arwen_baker on Twitter

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, see you again soon!!
> 
> @DyingNoyses & @arwen_baker on Twitter


End file.
